Cernig on Crooks and Liars reports that Republicans are scrambliing to rescue downticket races in the faces of an expected landslide loss at the national level. For the past 8 years, GOP members of the Senate and House have routinely supported every disastrous Bush policy, every step of the way. Now they own the mess they created. Let's hold them responsible. Barack Obama is right--the root cause of our current predicament is a failed philosophy--and the people who promoted and acted on it.
We should run against the GOP brand, not just McCain--in every race, at every level, from now through November 4.
Here's the great news: all the national polls have moved in our direction and Barack Obama continues to hold a statistically significant advantage over John McCain.
The bad news? Anything can happen between now and November 4th. Believe me, the McCain-Palin campaign is going to throw everything INCLUDING the kitchen sink at American voters in a desperate attempt to distract them from the campaign's failed policies and lack of vision. We've seen it all before and, God knows, we're already seeing it again.
Their tactics grow more and more divisive everyday as they "fire up" some of the least savory elements of their base. We see their pessimism in newspaper columns and online, we hear the fear-mongering in Palin's speeches laden with thinly veiled innuendo and flagrant untruth, and we can sense the hate shouted from the mouths of their angry supporters at rallies. This is certainly not the hopeful future of America that I dream about and I doubt it's the positive vision that you wish for our country either. But here's some good news: we have the chance to do something about it right now!
Now is not the time to grow complacent or cocky or to take the outcome of this election for granted. All of us care far too much about this country and its future to wake up on Wednesday, November 5th with the same sense of disbelief we felt in 2000 and 2004.
Remember that feeling? I do. But I have a three-word prescription for that potential post-election hangover: NOT THIS TIME. Not this election. Not this year. Not now. NOW is the time to:
Click here to visit my official and secure Barack Obama page and donate whatever amount you can afford right now. Whether it's $5, $10, $25, $50 or more, participation is what matters and every dollar really does count. Remember that Obama built his entire campaign on the support of millions of average Americans like you and me who gave whatever they could, and his campaign needs the continued support of all of us at this crucial moment.
DONATE NOW: http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/BrianNormoyle
Well folks it's official: John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin are waging a holy war against Muslims. They have apparently forgotten that those who attacked us in 2001 are radical fringe Islamists, not mainstream Muslims. McCain and Palin have forgotten that those same radical fringe Islamists have killed far more Muslims than non-Muslim people. McCain and Palin have forgotten that our enemy, Al Qaeda, is also the enemy of mainstream Islam. Instead the McCain-Palin campaign is engaging in blatant religious and racial stereotyping; exhorting Americans to be afraid of Senator Obama because his middle name is Hussein and suggesting Obama has ties to terrorists. Can any thinking America believe such preposterous innuendo and fear-mongering? Amazingly, this kind of tactic has succeeded before. Is this the "change" that John McCain has promised us? Sorry, but this is just more of the Bush-Rove Big Lie machine operation that has brought America the last 8 years of economic pain and international shame.
It is high time for America to send a message to those who use fear, lies and religious and racial stereotyping as weapons against ideas and truth to steal elections. Tell them we vote for truth, ethics and progress! Send the McCain-Palin-Rove campaign and their "snake oil" sales apparatus packing by voting for Obama-Biden for the Change We Need!! Our future - and our children's - depends on it.
Now those words are, indeed, a wonderful way in which to begin a dramatic statement about freedom, compassion, justice and hope. But, when these same words are applied to our personal perspective about life itself, and all the detail which flows with it, well, that is a bit different, and skews us into areas which can lead to supreme egotism and even totalitarianism. I published a blog the other day about some of the rare individuals I meet who evidence, what I consider to be, true patriotic belief. And those people act upon their beliefs, many times to their detriment. That blog is no longer around. I deleted it early this morning. It seems whom the people I thought I was complimenting did not see things from my perspective. They did not want to even be named with one another! Unlike on the rest of this communication infestation, called the internet, I had the power to delete....and so, at their request, I did.
Were they right to ask me to do that? Yes. You see, I wrote about them in such a way as to portray them from a perspective that they did not, and do not, share. I believed that my view of them was 'self evident.' And therein lies the rub. My perspective is skewed. It has to be. I do not see the world or any of this we are experiencing out here the way you do. I think I do. But I am intelligent enough to now understand, all these years past adolescence and early education, that I am not like you. And you are not like anybody else. Both my neighbors have McCain/Palin yard signs. I have none. One of my neighbors said; "You are an Obama man, but you don't have a sign. Don't you have the courage of your beliefs?" This man lives in an area, like me, in which there are hundreds of McCain signs but not one Obama sign. Courage was the key word in his comment. I am not stupid. I do not need to pay a price locally for my beliefs. And I do not like yard signs at all, anyway. But you see where my neighbor went with his thoughts? At least, if one can intuit his thoughts from what he stated. He thinks that I do not believe in Obama enough to have a sign. That belief is "self evident" to him. Thinking he knows me, he does not think for a second that I might be too afraid to put one up. Now that is my belief based upon what I believe his belief to be. And there we go. We all think that most of everything we think or believe ought to be "self evident." But it is not. At all. Start blogging and you will soon discover that for yourself.
So, does that mean that I cannot mention people at all when I blog? I don't think so. But I will not go on about their condition or presume to know what they are doing now or are up to, unless I have their permission. If they are people I admire or are friends. The others? Sorry, if you are going to be in the public then you are part of the public forum. And possibly, as I have done already once today, I will delete something I wrote about you. The rest of the internet is not so kind. That I am written up as a pirate (yes, a real ship stealing, by God tri-corn wearing and sea-going beast!), a bag man for Oliver North (no way, as I did not like him then and do not now), a person who wiped out some Mexican village (well, I kinda like that as I did love Magnificent Seven), the vault for some strange tape recordings of George Bush Senior involved in drug trading (ah, no, and I don't think he needed to be in drugs to become a billionaire), and so on. Nobody will delete any of that stuff. Yes, I was a 'player,' but I was one of the good guys. i believe that to be self evident.
So, I think I have known, and still do, some really terrific human beings, and here are some of them: Catherine Austin Fitts (head of Solari, a great woman), Mangosuthu Buthelezi (Chief of the Zulus in South Africa, and a fabulous man), Jim Webb (Senator in Virginia and a guy of supreme integrity), Rose Zamora (Chief of Staff for Bush Sr. and just like Mrs. Laningham in West Wing), David Milch (televsion producer and warm wonderful man), Barbara Bush (God, I love that woman!!!), David Shore (producer of House and what a mind!), Hugo Chavez (wild, wooly, expressive and a delight to be around). There. Some of them. If I get emails, I am not deleting. Mike Ruppert, yeah he is in there too, as well as that whacked out semi-economist and egomaniac Lyndon Larouche. So, I will continue to use people's names but will do so more carefully. I like having friends too!
I'll save the bad guys for later. Not that anybody reads this blog, except for the people I write about and who email me to stop writing about them. And Maureen Dowd who has lifted some of my work, and I love that she has. I couldn't list her here because I don't know her at all, except to read her wonderful columns (in latin today, no less!!!). Anybody of note out there? You may steal my work. I don't do this for a living.
Cindy McCain is absolutely right when she says this is the "dirtiest campaign in American history." However, it's not the Obama campaign that's slinging the most despicable lies and innuendos. It's the McCain campaign, with it's scurrilous attempts - especially in their recent utter desperation - to paint Senator Obama as a muslim and a friend of terrorists. Both of these images are fabrications of McCain's "Karl Rove Big Lie Machine" tactics that worked so well for George Bush in 2000 and 2004.
Ironically, it seems the McCain-Palin campaign has taken to behaving more like a terrorist organization, inciting their faithful with inflammatory racist lies. Anti-Obama shouts of "terrorist," "socialist," and even "kill him" have been reported by the media at McCain-Palin rallies, and fortunately the FBI is now watching. Meanwhile, Sen. Obama is staying rational and continuing a constructive conversation with America about how we are going to get out of the horrible mess that the Bush-McCain ideology has brought down upon us all.
Sen. McCain: Please turn off the Big Lie Machine and return to a campaign that does justice to the people of this great Nation...one that respects our intelligence to choose our next President based on truth. If you don't trust the AMERICAN PEOPLE to choose based on truth, how can you expect Americans to trust YOU with the most solumn duties and awesome power of the Presidency?
If America had any doubts that right wing extremists have hijacked the formerly venerable Republican Party, one need look no further than any McCain-Palin political rally this week. Both John McCain and Sarah Palin have jumped on the old Joe McCarthy tactics of baseless character attacks, outright lies and not-so-subtle innuendo. They are whipping up their supporters with racist code words and outrageous insinuations that Senator Obama is (a) a muslim (psst, his middle name is Hussein), (b) unpatriotic and un-American (psst, he disagrees with Bush-McCain policies), (c) a dangerous "fringe" person (psst, he's a "socialist") and (d) - the most despicable lie of them all - a friend of terrorists (psst, he's in cahoots with a former Weather Underground member).
It is very alarming to see this happening in America, our beloved land of the free, home of the brave! These are the most cowardly political attacks most Americans have ever seen...and they are coming from people who claim to care about preserving and protecting our democracy. More and more, however, McCain and Palin are inciting the loony right wing fringe to start vocalizing the most horrible and racist things about Senator Obama at their rallies. And this is supposed to pass for political discourse? This week's McCain-Palin rallies look and sound more like those frenzied 1930s Nazi Party rallies that brought Hitler to power.
This is a very dangerous, irresponsible tactic for McCain to employ, and it's only a matter of time before those who are incited to publically vocalize those terrible mob-mentality thoughts, will try to act on them. This is not the Republican Party your parents knew and loved, my friends, not the "Grand Old Party" of Lincoln, or even of Reagan. Based on what we've seen and heard this week, it's now the Nationalist-Republican Neo-Nazi Party. Perhaps real Republicans can take back their Party...but it looks like that day that will have to wait until John McCain loosens his grip on it. Sad, very sad for the Republican Party and for America.
McCain’s Strategy to Handle Our Economic Crisis
I am the mother of three children. When they were growing up we had a ritual in our house, everyone, including my husband and three children devoted our Saturday morning to work together to clean the house. This worked very nicely until my marriage started to fall apart. Then the lies and deception started.One Saturday morning as I gathered our family to divide the workload, I overheard my daughter whisper to her siblings, “Let’s don’t, but say we did”.You see the great plan was to hide the clutter under their beds, fluff the pillows, and draw the bedspread up to cover dirty sheets. It was a plan designed to make me think they were cooperating and working to make a better place to live, but in effect made a bigger mess of things. However, it did give the kids more time to play, they were making out like bandits under this plan.When I discovered their evil plan, there ensued much shouting, many baseless accusations hurled, and lots of finger pointing thrown in. All of these strategies worked to keep me distracted from dealing with the real problem.I was trying to clean the house but there were too many people working against me to get the job done.
I think the McCain Political House is using the same strategy. They only want to look out for a selfish few, who are in effect destroying our government. We call them, corporate lobbyist.
For example: This is the McCain philosophy for fixing the economic mess:
1. Let’s give the program a name that misleads our true goals, i.e. American Homeownership Resurgence Plan, when in fact it is a win fall for the mortgage companies. “Yes mommy, we will clean our rooms”.
2. Let’s just haze over the details of the program by presenting carefully chosen words that distort our true constituency. Let’s just throw the things that cause the mess under the bed and pull up the covers so as not to confuse Americans with the fact this is the same kind of ‘solution’ we have used to coverl our dirty tricks for years.
3. Let’s just tell the voters this program will clean up the mess and let people stay in their homes, which is really all they want to hear. In other words, let’s don’t, but say we did.
4. Hee, hee, hee, we can make out like bandits. Once again, we can funnel more of our countries’ vast financial resources into the pockets of our corporate lobbyists. “Yee, haw!” Or “Yeah, Baby, we’re outta here”.
5. If anyone dares to question our motives or the details of the plan, let’s just shout and protest loudly, then blame Obama for all our problems. ‘He did it’,’ No, she did it’, ‘No, it’s all their fault’.
And the beat goes on, nothing is done to help the vast number of American's who are facing an Economic Depression.
I just made another small donation to the Barack Obama campaign.
Because I so publicly withdrew my support, I feel that I should make this announcement in the same place I made my previous announcement.
This election is too important to me; I must do what I can to save our country from the people running the current McCain campaign (and our current administration).
For a longer statement, please see this post on my person blog (WARNING: contains some language not suitable for posting here or viewing at work):
http://sirshannon.com/2008/10/05/vote-early-vote-often/
McCain has sacrificed his honor in desperation to win the election. In addition his and Palin's tactics are beyond smear. They are lies that have stirred up hate and such emotion that it is a danger to Obama's life. The only good news is it seems to have now blown up in McCain's face and I think most Americans are finally realizing where Rovian ways lead. The last 8 years have been a disgrace and a national tragedy. Remember all lies lead to the truth.
OBAMA/BIDEN '08!
McCain is a two faced liar, and we need to keep calling him on it. John can't even look Obama in the eye when he makes his absurd claims, but sadly his own campaign thinks it has no choice left but to be dishonest.On Ayers, Palin herself can only cite a New York Times article which itself debunks her claim on friendship. She has no basis other than wishful thinking and intentional dishonesty. In any case, Palin has no credibility after lying during the ethics investigation until confronted with tape recorded evidence, lying about the bridge to nowhere, and now lying about what she read in a newspaper. A recent report unanimously concludes she abused her power. Palin's latest outbursts have long been discredited by the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, The New Yorker and The National Review. But as McCain noted, it's standard Nazi practice to repeat lies as often as possible.This is why even people who want to vote for McCain do so with disgust or plan to stay home. Most of his core supporters have essentially bought into a cult where they suspend common sense and individual thought. Both sides have been guilty of this in the past, but not since George Bush have so many ordinary Americans drunk the kool aid.McCain ran out of any credibility long ago, and he's in try-anything mode now. Attacking him is easy, but every attack needs to be followed up by talking about the issues. It needs to be pointed out that McCain is now running his entire campaign on lies, and weak ones at that.
Try as he might, McCain just can't help being Bush.
I was on jury duty this week down in Austin. Besides the regular sense of the goodness that you get when you spend a couple of days in a room with a bunch of Americans trying to do the right thing by some strangers, several hopeful things happened. First, there were no empty seats at either of the campus area watering places I was in on Tuesday. Everyone seemed to be listening to the debates intently, and kept shouting "Answer the Question John" after nearly everything Senator McCain said. There was lots of laughter when he said "not going to telegraph my moves" in the context of dealing with Iran. People seemed to feel that the telegraph was a pretty outmoded means of communications. It was refreshing to be surrounded by a lot of young men and women who apparently got it. There were half a dozen people walking around in the crowd with voter registration forms and absentee ballot request paperwork, and I saw folks in the crowd signing up. Hopefully it will make the jury pool bigger too.
In the bumper sticker count for the three days, I saw 43 Obama Biden and 3 McCain. Lots of the Obama Biden cars and trucks also had Noriega for Senator too. I also saw several fairly rude bumper stickers about Governor Palin which I won't repeat here. I experienced a dramatic difference in my bicycling. First, I never rode anywhere that I didn't see other people on bikes within a block or so. Twice, cars yielded to me when I had the right of way even though I was on a bike. Cars and EVEN PICKUP TRUCKS passed me with plenty of room, and would slow down if there was approaching traffic that did not allow enough room for them to pull out. No one honked at me the whole time. Everyplace where I needed to stop to shop, eat or have a drink there were bike racks to park my bicycle. Even at shopping malls. This is a radical difference from Fort Worth.
The Nikkei is down 50% from 1 year ago. S&P is down 40% from 1 year ago. If you take the Euro's recent devaluation into account, they're down by even more in dollar terms. It's going to get worse before it gets better, because these problems have been over 5 years in the making. There's plenty of blame to go around, but the bottom line is we need real leadership and honest solutions. Not petty gimmicks and reckless promises. Here's a quick review of our economic status:* 1 in 6 homeowners have zero or negative equity on their homes due to buying into a bubble, buying with little down payment, or taking out a HELOC to extract "dead equity": http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27089919/* Warren Buffet points out that with 45 day bonds approaching almost 0% interest, the free market is saying flat out that you are best off putting money under your mattress as an investor. Buffet notes that the market believes a 0% interest deposit will outperform the stock market - in fact it has and will. This is why I keep telling my friends to invest in gauranteed CDs at 3.5-4.0% (FDIC insured to $250K). * Paulson is offering a new radical plan every week. Right now, we're simply following the UK's plan after all, as many bailout opponents originally proposed. This is a tacit acknowledgement from Paulson that his original plan to buy $700 Billion in toxic assets at above market rates was a money losing scam disguising a subsidy for fraud. I'm against both ideas, but Paulson's is just plain worse. This just proves how directionless the Fed is with their massive gambles using our money.
* Paulson has already tossed more than a trillion at failed businesses, throwing good money after bad. That doesn't include the paltry $700 Billion bailout just passed. Just with the bailouts so far, every American will owe $38,000 in their share of national debt, mostly to foreign powers. This is a failure in leadership, pure and simple. Even when Greenspan was wrong, at least he had the professionalism to choose his words carefully rather than instill panic by worsening the crisis like Paulson has. America would have been better served by a mute sock puppet than Hank Paulson. Bush is just calling it in and counting the months left before it's someone else's problem - he's happily charging the nation's credit card on his way out.
Rather than go on about the problems with unemployment and worldwide recession, what we need now is leadership and a recognition of the issues with the will to tackle them. Even my Republican friends are talking with bitterness about how much more a fiscal conservative Bill Clinton was compared to Bush and McCain. These are people who actually voted for Bush both times, and against Clinton both times. They all hate McCain almost as much as I do, enough to either not vote at all or vote against McCain. The $300 Billion gimmick by McCain during the debate was just the last straw. McCain has zero leadership, and zero solutions beyond throw-money-at-it shortsighted gimmicks. Most Democrats won't ever understand why we think this way, and fiscal conservatives don't expect them to. But the bottom line is anyone who considers themself a real fiscal conservative would never vote for McCain. McCain doesn't know how to balance a budget, pay for what we spend, or even recognize that Bush tax cuts are a failure that won't "pay for themselves" as promised. We're all for tax cuts as long as they're paid for by reduced spending, not $5 Trillion throw money out the window gimmicks that Bush and McCain are adamant about. It's revealing how McCain supporters are largely the same pretend Republicans who've turned their party into the pro-deficit, pro-war, anti-American, and anti-Constitution party it is today. Today I just filled out my absentee ballot and mailed it off. The debates won't change anything for 85% of Americans, and McCain's $300 Billion comment is just an embarassment.I hated Romney too, but I'm wondering now if he would actually have been a better nominee. Huckabee or Ron Paul would have been a much lesser evil than McCain, but it was clear from day one it just wasn't going to happen. That's because Bush Republicans simply hate fiscal conservatives with a passion, a hatred surpassed only by their hatred for communists, liberals, and communist liberals. That's Bush's real legacy. This is the fascist, anti-American, and throw-money-at-a-hole leadership Bush and Paulson have repeatedly demonstrated. It simply transcends party lines. Obama, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan are in a whole other league compared to these frauds, and McCain is simply costing himself more votes at this point.
CNN is actually naming names. Anderson, the limp-wristed Cooper, has a top ten hit list. Each night he names a new high paid thieving fraud. One of those Republicans that ran one of those companies (like Lehman Brothers), although Anderson Light Weight Cooper will not go so far as to name each hit-listed maggot's party affiliation. He, and that cable company (and just about all the rest of the media), do not want to raise anger towards Republicans in general. Which they ought to be doing. This nation's anger needs to be focused right on those people. It is their belief system that caused this mess and it is the application of their belief system that is going to change all of our lives for the rest of our lives. They believed that it was okay to allow the people at the top to take as much as they wanted. They believed that enough money would 'trickle down' so that everyone would enjoy prosperity. They believed that anyone who could not work or who could not get a decent job, or inherit, should not have a life at all. They believed that you can go to other countries and do what you want with the indigenous population as long as it was in the 'best interests' of the U.S. They believed that we could torture people to get whatever information we wanted or needed. They believed that anybody at all who made a mistake should be sent to prison and then branded for life. They believed that they should be allowed to have as many of any kind of guns that they pleased and they should be allowed to carry or keep them anywhere.
And now...hell is coming to breakfast. And the Republican's guns are not going to help them. This nation: ...slowly it turns, step by step, inch by inch...the anger is building and it is looking for a place to go. And it has just begun. Cooper's hit list is way early in this thing. Yet, the conservative base is angry as hell. You heard it at the Waukesha get together thrown by McCain and Palin. The base members stood up to say that they are mad and they want McCain to really go after Obama. That the country is being taken over by socialistic bastards, basically. Yet, the bail out was pushed by Bush! The bailout was caused by Republicans! The Bailout was paid to Republicans! They are mad at themselves, but they are using common tribal displacement activity. They are taking their clubs and they are going to beat the women and children. The poor and the street people. The lost and the homeless. It is what they do. They actually celebrate the dumb stupidity of Palin. It is them.
I have been communicated with by many right-winger's. They call me an Obama Brown Shirt because I recommended that people write down the addresses where they see McCain Palin yard signs. I recommended that because those people, the one's writing the information down, are going to be so mad one day soon that they are going to take their anger to their neighbors. When those people have no food, and the electricity and gas have been turned off. when those people must watch their families slowly begin to decay and suffer. America, you have not seen suffering yet. Not anymore. You only know it at all from historical writings and some media from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. And the depression years, of course. But memory is short. And it is not physical memory. All that happened to other people. This is happening to you.
Can Obama, a single bright light in a darkening room, stem this building tide? I don't think so. Write them down. You can always throw away the list if Obama does indeed save us.
Everyone should watch this interview with the New York Times regarding the comparative differences of Obama and McCain's health care plans. If this isn't enough to scare the hell out of everyone, it should.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/38308/msnbc-decision-08-mccain’s-healthcare-plan-–-bad-medicine
So AIG execs, get an 86 billion dollar bailout, then they take a little vacation. It only cost us $440,000 of our hard earned dollars. Maybe they should have thought about saving that money, maybe then they would not have to come back to us again for another 37.8 billion. Yes you heard me right...they want us to fork over an additional 40 billion so they can again stop themselves from going under. Here is the article, please dont let it get lost.
When Obama said they should pay the government back and be fired, I guess the execs at AIG thought that was double talk for we should give them more money.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081009/fed_aig.html
After the FISA vote, I stopped donating and suspended blogging here. Mostly I was bitching about FISA anyway. While I'm not happy about that vote, I firmly believe that Barack Obama will make a great President and have renewed my financial support for his campaign. I hope that you will do the same.
http://my.barackobama.com/townhalldebate
Louisiana is now a tossup state based on current polling data, one that has been deep red for a long time. As an independent voter, one who does not belong to any political party, I remain encouraged about this as I think that a change in the political landscape presents an opportunity for those who are all over the political spectrum.
There are a few points of disagreement I have with Barack Obama and while he will not always make decisions I agree with, I believe that those decisions will be made with due consideration and in consultation with people who view different angles of an issue. This stands in stark contrast to the leadership we've had for the last few decades.
Louisiana can deliver her electoral votes for Obama. Vote, encourage your friends, families, and colleagues to vote. Make your voice heard.
If you have the means, chip in a few bucks here: http://my.barackobama.com/townhalldebate
The finish line is within sight. Let's get there and get ready to run the marathon.
